Ethics

At the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine on May 14, Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, Emmanuel and Robert Hart Director of the Center for Bioethics and the Sydney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a talk entitled “Ethical Lessons of Swine Vaccine Rationing.” Caplan, a widely quoted voice in bioethics, noted that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provided testing ground for pandemic and even bioterror response planning. What can we learn from the experience?

Caplan described several areas for improvement. First, he noted the plethora of plans, developed at different levels of authority, for dealing with the pandemic. Hospitals, corporations, cities, and states developed plans with different priorities and rationales, some of them potentially at odds. Caplan highlighted the conflict between, for example, a state that might decide to quarantine itself to attempt to reduce importation of disease and a vaccine manufacturer in that state with a need to distribute its product. Would the state plan necessarily take the manufacturer’s needs into account? More